The Girl Who

Girls

The only ones doing anything these daysare girlsthe girl with the tattoo on her left pinkiethe girl with the scar on her Barbie dollthe girls are out theredoing stuffchanging the worldwith their super powerswhile the boys just sit therejust like alwayslooking at the girls

From the Museum of Archeology in Naples (photos RYC)

The Girl Who Wrote a Book About a Girl Who Wrote a Book About Some Other Girl

Jane was a spunky girl. She did stuff. She didn't just sit around waiting for some boy to do stuff for her. She saw all those other girls at school who were so obsessed with their clothes and make-up. They made her want to vomit at them or punch them in the face with her Spidergirl knuckledusters. They made her want to rip their stupid Pocahontas halter-tops from their skinny bodies and toss them over the fence at the zoo where the alligators would rip them into shreds. Their bodies, that is, not the Pocahontas halter-tops. Those she would keep and decorate with spunky little girl butterflies. The butterflies weren't ordinary butterflies that waited around for boy butterflies to do stuff for them. Instead, they'd spit on the cocoon below them and drift into the clear light of day.

Jane was the "Some Other Girl" in the title. The girl who wrote about Jane, however, was also a spunky girl. Her name was Dolores, and her mouth was full of spunk. Her body was listless, having spent the last three days as an unpaid sex worker in a pleasure dungeon operated by Mexican narcotraficantes. Her experience there inured her somewhat to the delicacies of the male genius. John Keats was not an author she quoted much. The only thing that resembled a red rose was a splotch on her bedsheet. No nightingales serenaded her toward an easeful death. The account of her brief life in Ciudad Juárez, written with a nail file in the dust beneath her bed, was of more interest to forensic investigators than literary agents.

Dolores was the second "Girl Who Wrote a Book" in the title. The first Girl, named Irene, was a first year University student at Silver Wings. The previous evening she went to a lecture put on by the White Girls Matter activist group. Irene took Spanish classes and watched alot of documentaries about organized violence in places like Mexico and the Congo. She struggled to see a connection between the plight of a women in Juárez or Lubumbashi and the discomfort that Ashley, one of the lecturers, felt at being called a girl, and at being told her feelings weren't as important as the laws men had created to keep her down. Jane understood why Dolores felt bitter toward men, but she wondered how much trauma Ashley had suffered on account of the word girl. Irene understood Ashley’s need to take back the word girl, but wondered if she wasn’t belabouring the point.

As Ashley left the podium, a small cocoon appeared on the screen. The camera zoomed in and the cocoon turned into the swaddled baby of an Indian women in Bolivia. The woman's land had been polluted by a Canadian mining company and she was standing patiently in front of a parliament building demanding her rights. From the white bundle on her back an enormous butterfly burst into the air.